An error occurred while consolidating disks

Having received an alert that I need to consolidate disks on a VM I proceeded to do so.  However, after an hour or so the operation failed with this message:

The maximum consolidate retries was exceeded for scsi0:1

I tried several times to consolidate the disks but it kept failing.  A Google search didn’t return many useful results but I did find that the following solution worked for me:

1. Take a snapshot of the VM (don’t snapshot the virtual machine’s memory)

2. Consolidate the disks

3. Remove the snapshot

4. Consolidate the disks